but that's not the big point right now. the critical point is as moody's is warning, as ben bernanke warned today and congress, the critical point is this country must not go into default on august 2nd. and they need to reach some minimal agreement to avoid that. that should not be hard to do. now, what they can get beyond that is really important, but it's not as urgently necessary as making sure we get this done. then we can move to the more moderate term crisis or the moderate crisis, moderate term crisis which is the huge deficits. we do have to solve those, but not before august 2nd. we have to get a deal to avoid a catastrophe on august 2nd. >> so nicole, for republicans tomorrow, do they need to change strategy, given what happened today? or what do they do going into this meeting tomorrow? >> look, it was barack obama who stood in the rose garden just a few months ago and talked about -- when he signed into law the extension of the bush tax cuts, he seemed to understand that raising taxes is not the right thing to d